Healing Soils in India: For Better Crop Health and Human Nutrition

India's remarkable economic and agricultural transformation over the past six decades underscores both its achievements and emerging challenges in food and nutritional security. From producing 82 million tonnes (Mt) of foodgrains in 1960–61 to approximately 357.7 Mt in 2024–25, India has not only met the caloric needs of its rapidly growing population but has also become the largest exporter of rice globally, shipping over 20.2 Mt in FY2025 alone. At the same time, the country administers the PM-Garib Kalyan Yojana (PMGKY), the world's most extensive public food distribution scheme, which supplies 5 kg of free rice or wheat monthly to more than 800 million people. This combination of high production and subsidised access to basic staples has led to historic public food stocks, with the Food Corporation of India holding close to 57 Mt of rice — nearly four times the strategic buffer norm as of mid-2025. These gains have occurred alongside a significant reduction in extreme poverty, which has declined from 27.1 percent in 2011 to 5.3 percent in 2022. Despite these positive trends in food availability and poverty alleviation, chronic undernutrition persists, particularly among children. The National Family Health Survey (NFHS-5, 2019–21) shows that 35.5 per cent of children under the age of five are stunted, 32.1 percent are underweight, and 19.3 percent are wasted, revealing that caloric sufficiency alone does not guarantee nutritional well-being. These figures highlight the need to broaden the definition of food security to include nutrient quality, dietary diversity, and the micronutrient content of diets.